A gigantic crowd at Camden Yards came out to see a first-place club against a team that had won four games on the road all season, as the Rockies visited Baltimore for the first time.
One of those fans stole a fly ball from Newhan, and Todd Helton had a homer. Now it wasn't certain that Newhan was going to catch it, but he was right on it. That fan would spend the rest of the game laughing it up while I wanted to kick the TV. I mean, in the grand scheme of things I think it's cool that he got a Todd Helton home run ball, but I wish he would've gotten it some other way. For now, I am content to be upset about it.
The Oriole fans that made it out tonight may have not gone to a game all year. Many of them may not have even seen the team play more than a couple times this year. But they'd heard it was a hot ticket, first-place O's. They wanted to see the fuss on a Friday night.
What they got was circa 2001 offensive performance from the Birds, full of leaving the bases loaded, choking in situations where you can blow the game wide open, and more awful swings than you can shake a stick at. The Orioles seriously could have scored 10 runs tonight. Jason Jennings was as advertised, basically: 7 IP, 5 BB, 6 H. But 0 ER, because we choked the game away all night until the "exciting" ninth inning, when Eli Marrero led off with a triple and we threatened to actually score the runs we'd been promising all night long.
Marrero did end up scoring, but that was it. And it was the single most awful viewing experience of the season for an Orioles fan. It wasn't even just like we got beaten. Cabrera was really good, we got guys on base - simply put, we should have won. Easily. But we lost. And they even teased us with the dramatics in the ninth.
I hated this game.